Submitted by Industry Comment on Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:57

Jay Seaton, Chief Marketing Officer at mobile messaging specialists Airwide Solutions believes that recent reports about an increase in SMS spam surrounding the 2010 FIFA World Cup can be avoided if mobile users know the precautions to take.

“As mobile security continues to be a growing issue, scammers seeking any avenue to target the unsuspecting are quickly taking the SMS route to trick users into giving up sensitive information. We tend to see a dangerous spike in this activity around major and current events, as scammers attempt to disguise their messages with something timely and seemingly relevant. Given the major popularity of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it’s no surprise that most recently, scammers have been stepping it up in great numbers.

Australia recently saw a considerable spike in SMS scams. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Mobile phone scammers are using the FIFA World Cup to tempt Australians into providing their personal banking details in exchange for millions of dollars in phantom prizes.’

While these recent incidents occurred in Australia, there’s no doubt that scammers around the world will seek opportunity to take advantage wherever possible. In fact, in anticipation of this activity FIFA warns fans everywhere to be wary of these scams and hoaxes and that ‘Prize draws and competitions offering tickets to the 2010 FIFA World Cup can only be held by companies who are commercially affiliated with FIFA, such as, for example, sponsors.’

Working with mobile carriers worldwide to address mobile security threats, here at Airwide, we’ve come up with a list of some precautions that you, as end-users, can take to prevent being scammed:

• Contact your carrier to find out if they have personal security controls they could enable so you, as a subscriber, can limit whom you receive text messages from at all.
• Work with your carrier to set up individual blacklists and white lists and manage personalized blocking of specific keywords.
• Find out if your carrier has capabilities they can tap into to classify certain senders or pieces of content as unwanted.
• Always report spam either to your carrier via one of the customer service channels or through specific reporting channels that some carriers have set up. Some carriers have outlined processes for reporting SMS spam and even handset applications that will allow for reporting of specific spam messages, etc.

Tackling these SMS issues is an important step in mobile security and carriers are in a critical position to combat these threats with antispam and fraud solutions—especially during major events like the World Cup. As a result, users shouldn’t hesitate to work with them to prevent a major scam.”